Soldiers who had been missing for a couple of days in Iraq were found dead yesterday, and reports are that they were tortured and mutilated while still alive:

BAGHDAD, June 20 — Two U.S. soldiers, missing for three days since their abduction in an insurgent stronghold south of Baghdad, were found dead, a military spokesman said Tuesday, and a top U.S. commander ordered an investigation into why the men were isolated from a larger force in such a dangerous part of Iraq.

The remains of the soldiers — Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Ore. — were recovered near a power plant in the town of Yusufiya, where they had been operating a vehicle checkpoint that came under attack Friday, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell said in a briefing for reporters. A third soldier, Spec. David J. Babineau, 25, of Springfield, Mass., died in the initial assault.

“Coalition forces have in fact recovered what we believe to be the remains of our two soldiers,” Caldwell said. “Our heartfelt prayers go out to both the families and friends of our two soldiers.”

Caldwell declined to describe the condition of the soldiers’ bodies, saying it would be “inappropriate until I know what the families were told.” He said it was clear that the soldiers had died of wounds suffered in captivity, rather than at the site of the attack on the checkpoint, but that the cause of death could not be immediately determined.

According to residents of Yusufiya and a relative of one of the victims, the soldiers were beheaded. An Iraqi official said they had been brutally tortured before their death, but provided no further details.

Where is John Murtha now? He was so angry about alleged atrocities that American soldiers allegedly committed, that he was all over the news disparaging them as if they had already been convicted. Now, terrorists behead and torture two American soldiers and he falls quiet. Of course, he probably still wants us to cut-and-run, redeploying our forces somewhere where they won’t be able to have any effect on the terrorists and their attacks on the fledgling Iraqi democracy. Bear in mind that Murtha and his band of intellectual midgets know that unless the War in Iraq goes bad, they won’t be able to regain control of the House and Senate later this year in the elections. So, like the liberals they are, they spend their days disparaging the troops and their mission to all of the MSM reporters they can find. All they do is deal in doom and gloom, 24/7.

To the consternation of U.S. officials, who are careful to withhold casualty details until the soldiers’ families can be notified, the deaths were first reported by an Iraqi defense official. Maj. Gen. Abdul Aziz Muhammed Jassim said in a news conference Tuesday they had been tortured and killed “in a barbaric way.”

The Mujaheddin al-Shura Council, a collection of several insurgent groups including al-Qaeda in Iraq, claimed in an Internet statement to have “slaughtered” the two soldiers, suggesting they were beheaded. The group, which had vowed revenge on U.S. forces following the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi this month, claimed on Monday to have abducted the two privates.

Asked Tuesday if the Internet statements were credible, Caldwell responded: “Absolutely not,” and added that based on “preliminary analysis” there was “no reason to believe” the group’s claims.

In telephone interviews, two Yusufiya residents, Muyasar Ghalib al-Qaraghuli, 19, and a tribal leader who gave his name only as Abu Salam, described a gruesome scene in which insurgents beheaded and dismembered the soldiers after dragging their bodies behind pickup trucks.

“It’s something that we are against,” Qaraghuli said. “But what could we do? It happened.”

Those accounts could not be independently confirmed, though U.S. and Iraqi officials acknowledged privately that the killings had been particularly brutal.

You can not deal rationally with irrational people. It doesn’t matter what we say or do, the only way to get rid of the terrorist scum which is infesting Iraq is to kill them, and to kill them as quickly as possible. These people will smile at you and nod their head to anything you say, only to stab you in the back the moment you are off guard. It’s all they know, and they’ve been doing it for centuries. You must remember who you are dealing with here. These are young, uneducated animals who know little about anything out of their life experience. Their life experience includes little else other than being part of a religion which teaches that women are little more than property, and unimportant property at that, and that men are the be-all and end-all of everything. They are taught that anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe is an “infidel” and that the infidels must be killed, and that Allah will reward them for doing so. Finally, their religion tells them that the whole world must be made into an Islamic state, and that they should participate in Jihad to make it happen. How in the world do you reason with thugs like this?

Why Murtha and his ilk believe that by leaving Iraq with our tail between our legs we’ll achieve any of our goals is beyond comprehension, unless you figure election-year politics into the equation. Then it all makes sense.

NOTE TO MURTHA: Yes, I am questioning your patriotism. Prove me wrong.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 at 2:12 pm by Nick, and is filed under Military, Politics, War on Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.